Banana Splitsville by Catherine Clark

From the Publisher

Has he called? No.

I half expected to see him at Truth or Dairy today. He's sort of addicted to Coconut Fantasy Dreams. We both are. It was like . . . our drink.

I was all ready to give him the cold shoulder, easy to do when working around ice cream all day. I could give him a bad ice-cream headache, mix extra ice in his smoothie and freeze his brain.

Like he could be any colder.

Children's Literature

Courtney Von Dragen Smith has just been dumped by her boyfriend Dave, who is a year older and wants to start college "free and clear." As a result, Courtney starts a diary in which she swears off guys for the entirety of her senior year. Yet, she is confused by her emotions for Grant, a guy from school. She wants distractions, and since her work at Truth and Dairy is not enough, she runs for vice president of the senior counsel. However, that job lands her under an embezzlement investigation. Further, her mother is heading a campaign against a phone company; her grandparents have discovered Viagra; her dog keeps running away; and to top it off, her best friend Beth is hiding a secret: that she is dating Courtney's little brother. This book starts off slow and meanders through plot points, but the focus sharpens a bit by the end. It is told with a dry humor that is uniquely Clark's. The adventure continues in Clark's next book, Rocky Road Trip. Reviewer: Julia Wang

Product Details

• ISBN: 006136715X
  
• ISBN-13: 9780061367151
• Format: Mass Market Paperback, 288pp
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Pub. Date: May 2008
• Sales Rank: 17,565
• Age Range: Young Adult

• Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

8/17

How hurt do you have to be to sue for emotional distress?

Do you have to be completely devastated? Or can you just be extremely mad?

What about "really, really pissed off "? Does that hold up in court? I need to call Judge Judy. I need to be on Judge Judy. She'd rule in my favor. She would. After I made a devastating case against him. Which I think would be easy, even though I haven't exactly gotten into law school yet.

Is it bad form to drink a diet Squirt at 9 in the morning?

Well, I don't know, and I don't care. I don't even know why I'm writing this down—I don't keep a diary. But I have to jot this down—for history's sake. The History of Jerks.

Nothing I do could be in as bad form as what Dave did last night. I haven't even slept. Well, except from 4-8.

I can't believe I'm about to write this down. Dave actually broke up with me.

Broke up with me!

Sorry if I'm writing in really bad form, what Mr. Arnold calls "choppy" in my essays. But I feel a bit chopped up.

What was even worse than the fact he dumped me was how he did it. So tacky. Over the BBQ, while I watched my veggie burger burn, tempeh breaking down into flames like my life. I invite him over for a cookout, so we can plan how we're going to move all his stuff to Boulder next weekend. And he has a soda and some chips and then proceeds to tell me he's going to move on with his life now, thank you very much. Like I'll ever be able to eat again. He comes to my house and does this. Doesn't he know anything about how to break upwith someone?

Oscar was running around the yard, yelping, like he does before a big thunderstorm and during fireworks every July 4th. Animals can sense these kinds of things coming—why didn't I?

What follows is actually what he said. I'm not making this up. I wish I were.

"We'd probably break up in October anyway, so we might as well do it now, start the year free and clear."

Free and clear—that's like a deodorant, right? No, wait—that's a cell phone plan. Are you listening to the words coming out of your mouth, I wanted to say. Do you realize you are rhyming really offensive words, like "year" and "clear"?

"Yeah, and we'll probably die one day, so we might as well kill ourselves now," I said, following his brilliant logic.

"Courtney. Don't be like that," he said.

"Me? You're going to tell me how to be now?" That was when I got a little hysterical. Like he had the right to stand there and calmly eat barbecue-flavor potato chips and tell me my personality needed work. He's about as sensitive as a day-old hamburger bun. Which I wish I had served him. Maybe with nails inside the bun. He had orange-red powder on his lips from the chips and a speck or two on his soul patch. I was going to make fun of him, but I started thinking really depressing things like how I'd never kiss him again.

Then he thought he was getting through to me, because I was crying. So he went into his "this is really for your benefit" speech. "It'll be so different, with me away at college, I don't want to burden you or hold you back—"

"You're the one who doesn't want to be held back!" I said. "You don't want a high-school girlfriend. You want to go to frat parties and pick up girls—"

"I do not!" he said. "That's not why I'm doing this at all."

"Then why are you breaking up with me?" I said.

Ha. He didn't have a comeback for that.

But unfortunately I got caught up in staring at him while I waited for his comeback and I realized he was wearing that T-shirt I bought him when we went on that trip to Phoenix and Taos last spring and it's all faded now and looks really good on him because the washed-out blue kind of matches his eyes. And I got so furious at him for being able to look good while being such a jerk that I told him to leave.

"I'll call you," he said.

"Don't," I said, indignantly, like you're supposed to. Then he drove off, just like that, and I started bawling like a two-year-old. Okay, like Bryan when he was two years old.

People warned me about this. Said it might happen. Alison (supportive big sister as always) said we should break up, because "that kind of relationship never works."

"What kind?" I said.

"Long-distance," she said.

"He'll be in the next town," I said. "It's a half hour drive. When the traffic's bad." From Denver to Boulder is nothing, people do it every day as a commute. They have buses on the half hour. Crowded ones. And we even live slightly on the west side of the city, which is that much closer. He could get here by bike, even.

"Same thing. You're not in school together anymore. It wouldn't work."

Well, sure, it definitely wouldn't work now. After all the stupid things he said, about how we needed to grow and how we might find out we wanted to get back together, but we'd cross that bridge when we came to it.

I'm not crossing that bridge. I'm not even looking for it on a map. As far as I'm concerned, I was on that bridge, and he cut the rope on the other side, and now I'm hanging over a raging river, and people are going by in their kayaks and laughing at me. You know, those people who are really good at kayaking and never take off their sandals, not even in the winter. I hate those people. I think kayaks should be banned, except that extremely buff guys seem to paddle them bare-chested a lot.